“Acting White” and Oppositional Culture in Education

Abstract

In academic discourse, the concept of “acting white” became popular after the 1986 publication of a seminal article in the Urban Review, written by anthropologists of education, Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu. They posited that African American high school students were “burdened” by a need to negotiate their academic achievement with their racial identities. Findings from their empirical study showed that students equated achievement with conformity or “acting white.” Students who worked hard and gained high marks experienced social stigma from their peers. Specifically, Fordham and Ogbu contended that contemporary African American adolescents resist “acting white” by avoiding or rejecting those social behavioral patterns that they associate with whiteness—embracing the school curriculum, speaking standard English, spending much time in the library, or getting good grades, for example. Consequently, they participate in their own academic underachievement. The researchers argued that there is a cultural distrust in schools among African Americans, the result of their precarity within mainstream, white institutions. Primarily, the “burden of acting white” thesis serves as a popularized articulation of the “oppositional culture” explanation. In the 1970s, Ogbu researched why some minority groups, on average, perform better or worse in school. He conjectured that it is the community forces behind these students that illuminate general patterns in school success or failure. Community forces broadly describe how different groups perceive, interpret, and strategically respond to schooling in ways that correspond to their unique histories and adaptations to their minority status. He dubbed one group as involuntary minorities (or “caste-like minorities”), persons either forcibly conquered (indigenous groups) or brought against their will to an alien context (enslaved persons and their descendants). Ogbu posited that owing to a long history of institutional racism, involuntary minorities’ experiences with discrimination lead to a widespread conviction that education will not yield a payoff in the labor market. Thus, they develop oppositional attitudes toward school and, together with similar peers, may even come to see certain markers of identity as the province of the dominant racial group, Whites. In contrast, “voluntary minorities” (or “immigrant minorities”) view US society from a more culturally relativist perspective, comparing the US opportunity structure to their homelands, and thus respond differently to their social, economic, and political circumstances. According to Ogbu, unlike their involuntary minority peers, voluntary minority youth do not tend to embrace oppositional identities and do not reject mainstream achievement ideology. As a result, he argued, they tend to perform better in school and are more inclined for upward mobility.